Tag Archives: superhero

FFUUUUU—

Deadpool’s never really been my kind of comicbook hero. He’s dangerous, unhinged from reality and doesn’t take life seriously, but not in a frightening, Joker kind of way. Deadpool’s more of an annoying, won’t-shut-up, Spider-Man type, only, unlike Spider-Man, he’s not masking his own insecurities or expressing himself in a way he can’t in real life. No, Deadpool’s just annoying, and he constantly f*cks with people because that’s who he is on the inside, and I don’t really like that kind of character (or person). For a long time that was fine too, the only type of person that liked Deadpool was a certain type of comicbook nerd, a subset of a group of people nobody in reality cared about or wanted to spend any time around anyway, but then, all of a sudden, Deadpool was, like, the biggest deal in the world, the titular lead character of his own titular action-comedy movie, and played by one of the most comically handsome and spastically charming men in the world. And by the end of all of that, I didn’t really like Deadpool much more. Continue reading →

Thanos was right

This world doesn’t make sense any more. Californians are intentionally drinking untreated, unsterilized water they’re buying “off the grid” while people in Flint, Michigan still have too much lead in their taps. A ridiculous, Immortan-Joe-esque ignoramous is the President of the United States. Vaping is a thing. And Thanos is a major figure in our popular culture. Those four things might seem unrelated at first, but I’m pretty sure they all have megalomania and super-villainy at the heart of their origins. But we’re mostly here to talk about that last one, Thanos, today, because, as of April 27, 2018, people — normal people all over the world — suddenly knew who Thanos is. And the opportunity to talk about Thanos? As if he was something or someone people might know about? Someone people might actually care about? That makes almost no sense! That’s almost insane!Continue reading →

Am I woke now? I think I’m woke now!

Something I hear a lot around this time of year is “Happy New Year!” And not usually from Chinese people either, from people who, I think, feel a measure of personal progress when they say it to people who look like me. “Happy New Year!” they say to us. In the middle of February. Weeks later than January 1st. I’m not saying that I really mind when I hear it, I’m not trying to judge people when I hear them say it to me, almost any recognition and celebration of other cultures is a good thing, I’m just saying that when I hear Happy [Chinese] New Year, I can’t help but think to myself, “It’s not my New Year.” Sometimes with several exclamation points at the end. Continue reading →

Maybe you should just shoot him!

“Sure, I use a lot of automatic weapons and they have their place in combat. But I also have gone into my share of combat with a pump shotgun. The U.S. Marines use a Remington Model 870. I made great use of several in Vietnam, where I kept a cut-down shotgun close to me at all times. We’d cut down the barrel to, like 10” and load it up with 00 buckshot. Because, when ambushed, you might get the piece pointed in the general direction before you pulled the trigger. But, sometimes that was all that would be needed. Rapid-fire shot loads have the same effect as machine-gun fire, especially when there’s more than one shotgun.” Continue reading →

Meanwhile, in the universe formerly known as the DCEU

If you had told me back in 2007 — just one year after the disastrous X-Men: The Last Stand stalled that franchise to the point of needing a soft reboot and just one year before Robert Downey Jr.’s debut as Iron Man would kick off Marvel’s own Cinematic Universe — that the next ten years in movies would be dominated by superheroes, I’d have thought you were joking. And yet, here we are, a full ten years later and a full five years of reviewing them here at GOO Reviews (yesterday in fact marked our fifth anniversary), and superhero movies have gone from rarity to occasional hit to the driving force behind Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. It’s superhero movies that make most of the money in Hollywood these days, it’s superhero (and superhero-like) movies that executives want most to produce and fanboys want most to see, and it’s superhero movies that, as of 2017 with the release of Logan, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok, and the subject of this review, are now coming out at a rate of at least six per year (and that’s not even counting tangential 2017 superhero releases like LEGO Batman or Power Rangers). Continue reading →

That was… a lot…

If it feels like it’s been a while since we’ve talked about Thor here on GOO Reviews, you’re right, it has been a while, not since 2013 in fact when we published our review of Thor: The Dark World. And that’s actually a little weird because it’s not as if Marvel movies went away or became less popular in the four years since then, quite the opposite in fact. It’s just that Thor’s only managed one other movie appearance since then, 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, a paltry number in comparison to his fellow Avengers, Captain America and Iron Man, with whom Thor ostensibly shares the title of that team’s “big three”. In that same four-year timespan, as well as appearing in Age of Ultron, Captain America headlined two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s biggest and most eventful chapters in Captain Americas Winter Soldier and Civil War and Iron Man co-starred in and often even outshone the titular characters in Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming. That’s two more movies each for Cap and ol’ Shellhead to become even more the central figures of the MCU whereas Thor’s been mostly off world, doing gods know what in adventures that either had little to do with the MCU’s main, Earth-bound stories or that we had no real interest in (like [again] Thor: The Dark World [just as an example]). Continue reading →

Not even one of you is a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist?

So first of all, I’m not dead. Also, this site isn’t dead. But this past August in movies? So, so dead. For me, it started with Atomic Blonde, which I decided not to see (I’m not a bigJohn Wick fan anyway). Then The Dark Tower opened, and I thought I could skip it (like everyone else did). I was looking forward to The Glass Castle, but who needs to see movies like that when they get reviews like this? And that’s when I kind of lost it, and what started with not really paying attention soon made its way into a full-on zone out as we didn’t review anything for the whole month of August. My staff writers kept up with their weekly updates, the loyal little underling/peons/unknowing hostages they are, which meant you had something new to read here every week, but a whole, full-fledged review? I just couldn’t do it with this year’s late summer movies. So I didn’t. But we’re back! For a few more months at least! So on to The Defenders. At least I could watch that from home. Continue reading →

Tom Holland > Andrew Garfield > Tobey Maguire

How do you feel about Spider-Man? And I don’t mean “Spider-Man”, the series of movies that’s already gone through three reboots in less than 15 years because Sony, who bought the movie rights to the character from Marvel in 1999, has to rush a Spider-Man movie into production every few years or else the movie rights revert back to Marvel Studios, I mean the character — Spider-Man. If you listened to J. Jonah Jameson, publisher/editor of New York’s most infamous newspaper, The Daily Bugle, you might think he’s a public menace. If you were familiar with the comicbook lore, you’d most likely find him to be a misunderstood but friendly, neighbourhood hero, driven by guilt over the death of his uncle to responsibly use his powers for good. But whenever I hear anyone talk about Spider-Man in real life? They usually say they don’t like him. I’ve never really liked him that much either. And I think it’s all Tobey Maguire’s fault. Continue reading →